Vegan cheese is an abomination. Even if one is vegan they shouldn't eat that crap, just eat something else instead. You can make much better vegan food if you focus on trying to make vegetables good versus torturing them into a facsimile of animal products.
US cheese-in-tube is an abomination (I’m French ;-) ) and my Italian neighbor thinks the same about pinanle-fat-dough pizzas.
As for every product type there’s good and bad. I love this one[0], it’s made by a bunch of artisan chiefs near my city. Ingredients: soy, cajun nuts, ferments. Probable process: cook, smash, add ferment, wait.
Beside tradition offense there’s no reasons to restrain ourselves torturing-with-ferments lipid products that didn’t came out from udders. Fermented products are delicious and cooking has always co-evolved with technology, product availability and customs, why should someone restrain from experimenting?
I share the ultra processed disdain but to be honest there’s as much UPF in "fascimile" that some of their counterpart. That non-vegan-milk cheese has 16 ingredients in it[1].
The huge majority of cheese consumed in the US isn't any better than vegan cheese. And yes, the US does have good cheese! It's just a tiny sliver of all cheese consumed.
I think the larger reason is that fake cheese is cheaper.
In parts of Europe restaurants are allowed to sell it as cheese. That isn't true for frozen supermarket pizza, where regulations force to either declare it as fake cheese or use real one.
Most restaurants use fake cheese out of price concerns.
They're normal vegetables, but not normal pizza toppings. Just look at the menu offerings of any big US chain pizza place, deviating from that without warning is going to cause disappointment.
I'm from California, can't speak to the rest of the US... To me all except broccoli are perfectly normal pizza toppings. Not toppings I would expect to see on a Dominos pizza, but definitely to be expected on a "veggie" pizza from any independent pizza place.
I guess that counts as "normal," but that's fast food, where picky children's tastes rule. Predictability and therefore high-volume turnover of ingredients is paramount.
Eh, I find vegan cheese very variable. I never seek it out but experience it relatively often. Sometimes it's tasty and chewy. Sometimes it's a bland monstrosity. I don't know why.
If you haven't make shakshuka yet, it's worth a shot. It's one of my favorite places to use lots and lots of feta. It's not normally vegan since it's topped with an egg, but that's easy enough to remove and forget. Eat it with toasted pita.
You don't have to! You can just say it's imported from a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, so there's no canonically correct way to spell it.
It's probably a lie but it doesn't sound like one!
Though Arabic has quite a few letters you won't find in the Latin alphabet, all the letters in the word shakshukah map perfectly to Latin letters. But put an H on the end, and quarter-pronounce it.
I thought I liked vegan pizzas, having only tasted the restaurant varieties which either don't have cheese or have some sort of savoury dressing instead. Then I tried a vegan frozen pizza, and I found out what people hate about them. Some gray slimy substance which apparently someone, somewhere, thought was similar to melted cheese.
Most of them, I imagine, in order to accommodate vegan customers. Some advertise it louder than others.
> what are mystery veggies?
There's quite a variety out there. I've seen broccoli, sundried tomato, artichoke, spinach....